The right to privacy is an illusory right. It has not been officially established on constitutional grounds. It is not part of the constitution. Why, then, is the question of privacy an issue?

The 4th amendment established a protection against illegal search and seizure. It is from interpretations of this amendment that the so-called "right" to privacy has been derived. This right is not official and it does not protect individuals from laws that expose information to legal seizure.

So what constitutes legalizing search and seizure?

The Clinton Administration believes that encryption plays a fundamental threat to world order. Apparently the United States is the only country with encryption technology. This belies the empirical evidence of encryption software and the cryptographic knowledge that all other central powers (ie Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy, and the Former Soviet Union) have had for decades. This also denies the intelligence of what the United States labels "rogue nations," because it assumes that those nations are incapable of acquiring these common technologies.

This irrational reasoning has been used to justify expansion of regulations on cryptographic software. The most notable regulations are export controls that restrict the strength of encryption software that can be legally exported. The Clinton administration’s current regulations deny the export of cryptographic software that has already been exported in other forms.

At the core of the Clinton administration’s cryptographic regulations are key escrow policies. Key escrow would require giving the government absolute access to any and all encrypted information. Key-based encryption would involve not two keys, but three – the third being for the government.

The supporting belief behind key escrow policies is that criminals and terrorists will rely on encrypted communications and information to thwart government intervention. While at first it might seem that allowing the government to access encrypted information wouldn’t affect most people, the opposite is true. Encrypted information would not only be insecure but it would become suspect. Encryption would mean that someone had something to hide and had to be observed. Currently the government would have to use computers to break the keys and decrypt the message. With key escrow policies, absolute surveillance would be feasible.

Current legislation serves to endanger not only individual privacy, but individual free speech. Allowing observation of any and all material necessarily allows for regulation of the observed material under the label of domestic safety.